Not a 'Crime of Passion'

While the #MeToo movement has highlighted the need to take sexual assault seriously, there hasn’t been the same kind of cultural reckoning concerning domestic violence. A study by James Alan Fox and Emma E. Fridel at Northeastern University found that 45% of women murdered in the U.S. between 2007 to 2016 were killed by an intimate partner. The statistic for men? Just 5%. Too often, domestic violence has been covered as a private family matter, rather than as an urgent social crisis. Today more journalists are reporting with nuance and sensitivity on the complexities of the problem. As Susan Stellin writes in her cover story, “Reporters are exploring how factors like race, class, and immigration status can influence victims’ vulnerability to domestic violence and willingness to report it, as well as how the criminal justice system and service providers deal with these cases. They’re also examining the roots of the problem, efforts to rehabilitate perpetrators, and patterns of abuse, such as strangulation, that are more likely to end in the victim’s death.”